Buffalo Garden Symposium Considers Gardening Issues Afoot in the Land

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Whether they are engaged in garden tourism,
indigenous "green gardening," beautifying the yard or reclaiming
the area's historic landscapes, Buffalo is a city of gardeners and
garden lovers and the University at Buffalo Gender Institute has a
present for them.

In anticipation of October's "Engendering Gardens," its
extensive 2012 Gender Week program, UB's Gender Institute will
present the Buffalo Garden Symposium on September 21. It will be
held from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Harriman Hall ballroom on the
UB South Campus. The event will include refreshments and lunch, but
space is limited so an RSVP is required to Audrey Kubiniak
adjones@buffalo.edu by September 17.

The symposium is a free public event at which a dozen scholars
and community-gardening activists will discuss urban agriculture,
environmental restoration, gardens, landscape, food policy and
historic preservation.

Panelists will include faculty members from many disciplines at
UB and Cornell University and community leaders from Garden Walk
Buffalo, the Massachusetts Avenue Project (MAP), Grassroots
Gardens, Graycliff (the lakeside retreat designed by Frank Lloyd
Wright), and the Buffalo Olmstead Parks Conservancy.

The first of two morning panels will be chaired by Kari Winter,
professor of American and transnational studies, and director of
the Gender Institute.

Participants will be Diane Picard, executive director of MAP,
who will discuss its work in Buffalo's urban agricultural movement
and Samina Raja, associate professor of urban and regional planning
at UB, a noted food policy analyst who will consider how government
policies can undermine or facilitate community gardening and urban
agriculture.

They will be joined by Donald Grinde, professor of American and
transnational studies at UB, and an expert on Native American
environmental history, who will discuss Native ecological
perspectives.

Other panelists will be ethicist Ken Shockley, associate
professor of philosophy at UB, where he directs the Sustainability
Academy, who will address environmental ethics and climate change,
and Randy Schiff, associate professor of English at UB, who will
discuss ecocriticism, the interdisciplinary field that considers
possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary
environmental situation.

The second morning panel, chaired Ewa Pionowska Ziarek, Julian
Park Professor of Comparative Literature at UB, will discuss
gardens of various kinds and purposes in and around Buffalo.

Panelists will include Jim Charlier, president of Garden Walk
Buffalo, on the history of the event and the future of garden
tourism in Buffalo, and Reine Hauser, executive director of
Graycliff, who will discuss the restoration of the estate's
historic landscape.

They will be joined by ecological gardener Laura Garofalo Khan,
assistant professor of architecture at UB, who will speak to ways
in which architecture and nature engage one another through the
garden, and Sierra Adare-Tasiwoopa Api, doctoral student in
American and transnational studies, who will present the indigenous
tradition of "green" or ecologically sustainable gardening.

Afternoon panelists will include Joseph A. Gardella, John and
Frances Larkin Professor of Chemistry at UB, on studies of soil
contamination important for urban farmers and gardeners in Buffalo;
Susannah Barton of Grassroots of Buffalo on how grassroots
movements have empowered city communities to transform vacant lots
into vibrant gardens; Hannah Shayler and Murray McBride, crop and
soil sciences experts in the Cornell University Waste Management
Institute, and Steven Nagowski, manager of volunteers in Buffalo's
Olmstead Parks Conservancy, who will speak to the conservancy's
volunteers as an important component in its public land management
effort.

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